[Footnote: Printed by permission of B.P. Button & Company from "The
Transfigured Sackcloth and Other Sermons," by W.L. Watkinson.]
For none might enter into the king's gate clothed with sackcloth.—Esther iv., 2.
The sign of affliction was thus excluded from the Persian court in order that royalty might not be discomposed. The monarch was to see bright raiment, flowers, pageantry, smiling faces only; to hear only the voices of singing men and singing women; no smatch of the abounding wormwood of life was to touch his lip, no glimpse of its we to disturb his serenity. The master of an empire spreading from India to Ethiopia was not to be annoyed by a passing shadow of mortality. Now, this disposition to place an interdict on disagreeable and painful things still survives. Men of all ranks and conditions ingeniously hide from themselves the dark facts of life—putting these aside, ignoring, disguising, forgetting, denying them. Revelation, however, lends no sanction to this habit of passing by the tragedy of life with averted face; and in this discourse we wish to show the entire reasonableness of revelation in its frank recognition of the dark aspects of existence. Christianity is sometimes scouted as "the religion of sorrow," and many amongst us are ready to avow that the Persian forbidding the sackcloth is more to their taste than the Egyptian or the Christian dragging the corpse through the banquet; but we confidently contend that the recognition by Christ of the morbid phases of human life is altogether wise and gracious.
I. We consider, first, the recognition by revelation of sin. Sackcloth is the outward and visible sign of sin, guilt, and misery. How men shut their eyes to this most terrible reality—coolly ignoring, skilfully veiling, emphatically denying it! "The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful…." We strive for the right and the true: it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us. What is popularly called sin these philosophers call error, accident, inexperience, indecision, misdirection, imperfection, disharmony; but they will not allow the presence in the human heart of a malign force which asserts itself against God, and against the order of His universe. That principle which is darkness in the mind, perverseness in the will, idolatry in the affections, "every passion's wild excess, anger, lust, and pride,"—the existence of any such principle they absolutely and scornfully deny. There is no evil in the universe, all is good, and where everything is good human nature is still the best. A single substance comprises all that is, and no place is left for that profoundly decisive and destructive element called sin; all that we have to do is to descant on the marvelous loveliness of the world, the serene harmony of the universe, man's love of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Intellectual masters like Emerson and Renan. ignore conscience; they refuse to acknowledge the selfishness, the baseness, the cruelty of society; they are deaf to the groans of creation; they smile, and expect us to smile, whilst they clap a purple patch of rhetoric on the running sores of humanity. No sackcloth must pass their gate, and no craftsman of Ind ever wove gossamer half so delicate and delightful as the verbal veil with which these literary artists attempt to conceal the leprosy of our nature.
And men generally are willing to dupe themselves touching the fact and power of sin; they are strongly disinclined to look directly and honestly at that inner confusion of which we are all more or less conscious. We willingly acknowledge our transgression of the higher law, that we do the things we ought not to do, and leave undone the things that we ought to do; we have an unpleasant feeling that all is not right, nay, indeed, that something is seriously wrong; but we do not unshrinkingly acquaint ourselves with the malady of the spirit as we should at once acquaint ourselves with any malady hinting itself in the flesh. The sackcloth must not mar our shallow happiness. Great is the power of self-deception, but in no other direction do we permit ourselves to be more profoundly cheated than we do in this. In the vision of beautiful things we forget the troubles of conscience, as the first sinners hid themselves amid the leaves and flowers of Paradise; in fashion and splendor we forget our guilty sorrow, as medieval mourners sometimes concealed their cerements with raiment of purple and gold; in the noises of the world we become oblivious of the interior discords, as soldiers forget their wounds amid the stir and trumpets of the battle. With a busy life, a gay life, we manage to forget the skeleton of the heart, rarely permitting ourselves to look upon the ominous specter which some way or other has entrenched itself within us, and which is the bane of our existence.
Nevertheless, sin thrusts itself upon our attention. The greatest thinkers in all ages have been constrained to recognize its presence and power. The creeds of all nations declare the fact that men everywhere feel the bitter working and intolerable burden of conscience. And, however we may strive to forget our personal sinfulness, the cry is ever being wrung from us in the deepest moments of life, "O wretched man that I am! who can deliver me from the body of this death?" The sense of sin has persisted through changing generations; it is the burden of experience and philosophy, and the genius of the race has exhausted itself in devising schemes of salvation.
Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, knew of truth, justice, purity, and love, of the supreme and eternal law of righteousness; they knew that man alone of all this lower creation is subject to this transcendental rule; they knew also that the violation of this highest law lay at the root of the world's mysterious and complex suffering—in other words, that sin was the secret of the tragedy of life. The beasts are happy because they are beasts; they do not lie awake in the dark weeping over their sins, because they have no sins to weep over; they do not discuss their duty to God, they do it; whilst, on the contrary, men are unhappy because being subject to the highest law of all, and competent to fulfil that law in its utmost requirements, they have consciously fallen short of it, wilfully contradicted it. We cannot accept the coat of many colors, whatever the flatterers may say; the sackcloth is ours, and it eats our spirit like fire.
Most fully does Christ recognize the great catastrophe. Some modern theologians may dismiss sin as "a mysterious incident" in the development of humanity, as a grain of sand that has unluckily blown into the eye, as a thorn that has accidentally pierced our heel, but the greatest of ethical teachers regarded sin as a profound contradiction of that eternal will which is altogether wise and good. More than any other teacher Jesus Christ emphasized the actuality and awfulness of sin; more than any other has He intensified the world's consciousness of sin. He never attempted to relieve us of the sackcloth by asserting our comparative innocence; He never attempted to work into that melancholy robe one thread of color, to relieve it with one solitary spangle of rhetoric. Sin was the burden of the life of Christ because it is the burden of our life. Christ has done more than insisted on the reality, the odiousness, the ominousness, of sin—He has laid bare its principle and essence. The New Testament discovers to us the mystery of iniquity as ungodliness; its inmost essence being unbelief in God's truth, the denial of His justice, the rejection of His love, the violation of His law. The South Sea islanders have a singular tradition to account for the existence of the dew. The legend relates that in the beginning the earth touched the sky, that being the golden age when all was beautiful and glad; then some dreadful tragedy occurred, the primal unity was broken up, the earth and the sky were torn asunder as we see them now, and the dewdrops of the morning are the tears that nature sheds over the sad divorce. This wild fable is a metaphor of the truth; the beginning of all evil lies in the alienation of the spirit of man from God, in the divorce of earth from heaven; here is the final reason why the face of humanity is wet with tears. How vividly Christ taught that all our fear and we arise out of this false relation of our spirit to the living God! Above and beyond all, Christ recognizes the sackcloth that He may take it away. In the anguish of his soul Job cried, "I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou Preserver of men?" Christianity is God's full and final answer to that appeal. In Christ we have the revelation of God's ceaseless, immeasurable, eternal love. In Him we have the satisfaction of God's sovereign justice. Our own awakened conscience feels the difficulty of absolution; it demands that sin shall not be lightly passed over; it wearies itself to find an availing sacrifice and atonement. "Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world!" In Him, too, we have that grace which brings us into accord with the mind and government of God. Christ reveals to us the divine ideal life; He awakens in us a passion for that life; He leads us into the power and privilege, the liberty and gladness, of that life. He fills our imagination with the vision of His own divine loveliness; He refreshes our will from founts of unfathomable power; He fills us with courage and hope; He crowns us with victory. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." Sin is ungodliness; Christ makes us to see light in God's light, fills us with His love, attunes our spirit to the infinite music of His perfection. Instead of shutting out the signs of wo, Christ followed an infinitely deeper philosophy; He arrayed Himself in the sackcloth, becoming sin for us who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. We have redemption in His blood, even the forgiveness of sins; he established us in a true relation to the holy God; He restores in us the image of God; He fills us with the peace of God that passeth understanding.
Not in the spirit of a barren cynicism does Christ lay bare the ghastly wound of our nature, but as a noble physician who can purge the mortal virus which destroys us. He has done this for thousands; He is doing it now; in these very moments He can give sweet release to all who are burdened and beaten by the dire confusion of nature. Sin is a reality; absolution, sanctification, peace, are not less realities. Christ's gate is not shut to the penitent, neither does He send him empty away. We go to Him in sackcloth, but we leave His presence in purity's robe of snow, in honor's stainless purple, in the heavenly blue of the holiness of truth. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Him, that He may give to the mourners in Zion beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
II. We consider the recognition by revelation of sorrow. Sackcloth is the raiment of sorrow, and as such it was interdicted by the Persian monarch. We still follow the insane course, minimizing, despising, masking, denying suffering. Society sometimes attempts this. The affluent entrench themselves within belts of beauty and fashion, excluding the sights and sounds of a suffering world. "Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, that chant to the sound of the viol, and invent to themselves instruments of music, like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments: but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph." So do opulent and selfish men still seek "to hide their heart in a nest of roses." Literature sometimes follows the same cue. Goethe made it one of the rules of his life to avoid everything that could suggest painful ideas, and the taint of his egotism is on a considerable class of current literature which serenely ignores the morbid aspects of life. Art has yielded to the same temptation. The artist has felt that he was concerned only with strength, beauty, and grace; that he had nothing to do with weakness, agony, wretchedness, and death. Why should sorrow find perpetual remembrance in art? Pain will tear our bodies, but we will have no wrinkles on our statues; suffering will rend our heart, but we will have no shadows on our pictures. None clothed in sackcloth might enter the gate that is called Beautiful.